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IJCAI 2026

Learning Kernelized Hypothesis for Hidden Confounder Detection

Yikai Chen, Haotian Wang, Yunxin Mao, Xinpeng Lv, Shaowu Yang, Kun Kuang, Xinwang Liu, Wenjing Yang

Detecting hidden confounding is crucial for reliable causal analysis from observational data, directly determining which downstream causal inference method to be deployed. Inspired by the theory of higher-order regression, recent sample-efficient hypothesis testing strategies overcome the restrictive requirement of multiple heterogeneous data environment. Despite their progress on single-environment confounder detection, such methods suffer from intrinsic flaws that the structural functions of the causal models should be specified in prior (linear or specific kernel functions). By contrast, real-world data acquisition exhibits diverse, unknown forms of structural functions, imposing an important but challenging gap between theories of higher-order regressions to practical confounder detection. In this paper, we contribute a Bi-level Kernel Confounder Detection (BiKCD) framework by learning adaptive kernelized structural space of structural functions. Subsequently, our BiKCD constructs hypothesis testing by comparing coefficients from the higher-order regression and the classical ordinary least squares in learned kernelized space. Finally, the hypothesis is calibrated to ensure valid inference under adaptivity. Theoretically, we establish an oracle-type risk bound for the selected structural space over a candidate kernel family, with the Type-I error control for the downstream test. Extensive experiments on synthetic and real-world datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed BiKCD.

IJCAI 2026

CDS4RAG: Cyclic Dual-Sequential Hyperparameter Optimization for RAG

Pengzhou Chen, Tao Chen

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) is sensitive to the vast hyperparameters of the retriever and generator, yet optimizing them using given queries remains a challenging task due to the complex hyperparameter interactions and expensive evaluation costs. Existing algorithms are ineffective and slow in convergence, since they often treat RAG as a monolithic black box or only optimize partial hyperparameters. In this paper, we propose CDS4RAG, a framework that optimizes the full hyperparameters of RAG using given queries via a new formulation of cyclic dual-sequential problem. CDS4RAG is special in the sense that it distinguishes the hyperparameters of the retriever and generator, optimizing them in turn and in a cyclic manner. Such a paradigm allows us to design fine-grained within-cycle budget provision and expedite the optimization via cross-cycle seeding when optimizing the generator. Importantly, CDS4RAG is an algorithm-agnostic framework that can be paired with diverse general algorithms. Through experiments on four common benchmarks and two backbone LLMs, we reveal that CDS4RAG considerably boosts the vanilla algorithms in 21/24 cases while significantly outperforming state-of-the-art algorithms in all cases with up to 1.54x improvements of generation quality and better speedup.

IJCAI 2026

Bridge: A Cross-Modal Learning Framework for Unified Semantic Representation in Noisy Communication

Liang Chen, Yanze Huang, Limei Lin, Xiaoding Wang, Wei Lou, Jie Wu, Sun-Yuan Hsieh

Multimodal semantic communication systems face a critical challenge in extracting and aligning semantic features across heterogeneous modalities within a unified representation space, particularly under noisy transmission conditions. To address this, we propose Bridge, a cross-modal learning framework that integrates video, audio, and text into a unified semantic space through feature disentanglement and contrastive alignment. Bridge separates modality-specific and modality-invariant representations, enhancing both intra-modal precision and inter-modal generalization. During decoding, it leverages heterogeneous foundation models to preserve semantic fidelity under channel noise. Extensive experiments on multiple multimodal benchmarks under varying SNR levels demonstrate that Bridge maintains high semantic consistency and reconstruction quality, improving image reconstruction by approximately 16.3% in low-SNR regimes. Our work provides a practical and theoretically grounded framework for next-generation multimodal semantic communication systems.

IJCAI 2026

Speaking Numbers to LLMs: Multi-Wavelet Number Embeddings for Time Series Forecasting

Defu Cao, Zijie Lei, Muyan Weng, Jiao Sun, Yan Liu

Large language models (LLMs) are attractive for context-aware time series forecasting because they can integrate heterogeneous textual signals, yet their discrete, language-oriented tokenization and embedding interfaces are misaligned with continuous numerical values, often harming numerical ordering and forecasting reliability. We propose TempoWave, a plug-and-play temporal wavelet digit interface that maps each scalar observation into digit-wise embeddings constructed from multi-wavelet, multi-scale coefficients. By directly overriding standard token representations, TempoWave seamlessly exposes both fine-grained local fluctuations and macro global structures in a transformer-compatible form, ensuring that precise numerical formatting, distinct digit identity, and robustness to common normalization operations are maintained throughout the LLM pipeline. Experiments across five context-enriched forecasting benchmarks demonstrate that TempoWave consistently improves LLM-based forecasters over standard numeric tokenization and alternative embedding interfaces, achieving a new state-of-the-art. These results highlight the numeric interface as a key bottleneck and suggest that principled multi-resolution embeddings can better couple LLMs' contextual reasoning with precise forecasting. Our code is available at https://github.com/DC-research/TempoWAVE.

IJCAI 2026

Beyond Implicit Constraint: Explicit Low-Rank Structured Subspace Learning for Fast Attributed Graph Clustering

Yaoming Cai, Song Liu, Zijia Zhang, You Wu, Xiaobo Liu, Yao Ding, Fei Li

Attributed graph clustering has achieved remarkable success by synergistically integrating topological structures and node attributes. While subspace learning has emerged as a dominant paradigm for node partitioning, most existing methods rely on implicit low-rank constraints, which often fail to capture complex nonlinear manifolds and suffer from prohibitive computational overhead on large-scale graphs. In this paper, we propose ELSS (Explicit Low-rank Structured Subspace learning), a scalable and robust framework that transcends implicit formulations. Specifically, ELSS learns an explicit and nonlinear low-rank subspace within a graph-structured embedding space, effectively uncovering latent cluster structures. To effectively mitigate the pervasive oversmoothing issue, we introduce a homophily-aware adaptive graph filter, which dynamically calibrates smoothing intensity to preserve discriminative ego-information. Furthermore, to ensure linear scalability, we develop a PageRank-guided structural sampling strategy for anchor-based approximation, which identifies pivotal landmarks based on their global topological prestige. Theoretical analysis guarantees that ELSS effectively mitigates spectral collapse while maintaining a linear complexity. Extensive experiments on diverse benchmarks demonstrate that ELSS consistently delivers superior clustering accuracy over state-of-the-art methods.

IJCAI 2026

Addressing Downward Memory Loss in Hierarchical GNN Forecasters Through Memory-Buffered Decoding

Thomas Bailie, S. Karthik Mukkavilli, Varvara Vetrova, Yun Sing Koh

Accurate spatio-temporal forecasting requires modeling interactions across multiple spatial and temporal scales. Existing Graph Neural Network (GNN) forecasters primarily operate at a single local scale, limiting their ability to capture global processes that govern system dynamics. Hierarchical GNNs (HGNNs) aim to address this limitation by learning multiscale representations, but in practice, they often fail to preserve global information during coarse-to-fine propagation. We identify this limitation as downward memory loss, where global trends learned at coarse resolutions diminish before influencing fine-grained predictions, leading to misaligned local dynamics. We propose HiGFlow, an HGNN forecaster that explicitly preserves multiscale trends through a self-updating memory buffer that integrates into the coarse-to-fine information flow. This design maintains global contextual signals as an inductive bias throughout hierarchical decoding. We provide a theoretical analysis indicating that when decoding, HiGFlow preserves multiscale trends where residual-based architectures may fail to do so. Empirically, HiGFlow achieves substantially lower MAE and RMSE than state-of-the-art forecasting models across multiple benchmark datasets, demonstrating the importance of explicit global memory in multiscale spatio-temporal forecasting. Our implementation is available at https://github.com/TB862/HiGFlow.

IJCAI 2026

Computing Coverage-Based Prime Implicant Explanations for Tree-Based Models

Gilles Audemard, Sylvie Coste-Marquis, Pierre Marquis, Mehdi Sabiri, Nicolas Szczepanski

Coverage-based prime implicant explanations are formal explanations offering a number of valuable assets, especially in terms of faithfulness and generality. Unfortunately, deriving a coverage-based prime implicant explanation for an instance is computationally hard in the general case (the problem of identifying such an explanation being at the second level of the polynomial hierarchy). In this paper, we focus on the computation of a coverage-based prime implicant explanation for an instance given a tree-based model. We show that the specific nature of the domain theory linking the Boolean conditions in such models makes the problem computationally easier. We present a greedy algorithm to derive coverage-based prime implicant explanations when dealing with a tree-based model. We also present an empirical evaluation showing that this algorithm is efficient enough to be used in many practical cases.

IJCAI 2026

The Complexity of Verifying Feedforward Neural Networks in Quantised Settings

Eric Alsmann, Martin Lange, Marco Sälzer

We investigate the computational complexity of neural network verification in quantised settings. We distinguish three classes of Feedforward Neural Networks (FNNs): rational FNNs with exact rational weights, quantised FNNs whose weights come from a finite-width arithmetic, and dynamically quantised FNNs in which rational networks are evaluated with respect to a given finite-width arithmetic. We consider two types of specifications used in the literature. Linear programming (LP) specifications are conjunctions of linear constraints, while bit-vector (BV) specifications allow reasoning at the bit level and can express non-linear constraints. Our results give a complexity landscape of these verification problems. For quantised FNNs with fixed arithmetic precision, we show that verification under both LP and BV specifications remains NP-complete, matching the complexity of the rational case. For dynamically quantised FNNs with BV specifications, we establish upper bounds, complementing a previously known PSPACE-hardness result.

IJCAI 2026

Semifactual Explanations for GNN-based Classification: Formal Foundations, Complexity and Computation

Gianvincenzo Alfano, Sergio Greco, Domenico Mandaglio, Francesco Parisi, Reza Shahbazian, Irina Trubitsyna

Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have become increasingly central to several analysis tasks in various domains, ranging, e.g., from social networks to molecular analysis. Understanding the decision-making process of GNNs is a critical challenge in machine learning, particularly when post-hoc explanations, attempting to answer why specific inputs are classified in a certain way by a given model, are required for specific input predictions. Existing post-hoc explainability methods for GNNs often rely on counterfactual reasoning, grounded in the `if this had not occurred' thinking, that typically identifies minimal subgraphs perturbations that would change a prediction. Notably, less attention has been posed on the equally important semifactual reasoning, grounded in the `even if this has not occurred' thinking, that results in identifying maximal subgraphs perturbations that would not change a prediction. In this paper, we introduce a novel technique for post-hoc explainability queries in GNNs by focusing on the semifactual reasoning. We first thoroughly investigate the computational complexity of several reasoning and optimization problems related to the computation of semifactuals, and then propose a novel learning architecture for addressing their computation. Finally, we experimentally evaluate the proposed approach in a variety of settings, showing its effectiveness in generating high-quality semifactual explanations.

IJCAI 2026

Semantic Geometric Calibration in Randomized Neural Feature Space

Itay Abuhazera, Liron Cohen, Gil Einziger

Modern neural networks can be accurate yet poorly calibrated. We present Random Geometric Calibration (RGC), a post hoc method that augments confidence estimation with a geometric signal derived from distances to training data in an aggregated semantic representation space. Prior geometric calibration methods in feature space often rely on architecture-specific layer choices, which can be unstable across models and datasets. To avoid this dependence, RGC samples a fixed number of intermediate blocks uniformly at random and reuses this set at both calibration and test time. We instantiate RGC with RGCL, which applies spatial pyramid pooling to each sampled activation, projects features to a fixed dimension, and computes a nearest-neighbor separation score that is mapped to probabilities via isotonic regression. We also present RGCC, which replaces pooling and projection with uniform coordinate sampling for improved computational efficiency. We evaluate RGCL and RGCC across multiple datasets, including CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, and Tiny-ImageNet, and across a diverse set of architectures such as ResNet, DenseNet, and DINOv2. Our results show that RGCL achieves state-of-the-art or near state-of-the-art calibration performance, reducing expected calibration error by approximately 78% on average and by up to 97% for some models. Finally, we provide representation analysis that explains why RGCL and RGCC succeed without layer selection and characterize their computational overheads. We observe that layers exhibiting favorable geometric structure tend to emerge in later network blocks, and that randomized aggregation implicitly emphasizes these layers, leading to robust and reliable calibration performance.

IJCAI 2026

Adaptive GoGI-Skip: Coupling Goal-Gradient Importance with Dynamic Uncertainty for Efficient Reasoning

Ren Zhuang

Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting trades inference speed for reasoning accuracy. Existing compressors force a compromise as static gradient techniques treat tokens independently, severing sequential logic, while uncertainty-based pruning ignores the final answer. We introduce Adaptive GoGI-Skip, a framework that resolves this tension by non-linearly coupling Goal-Gradient Importance (GoGI) with Adaptive Dynamic Skipping (ADS). GoGI quantifies each token's functional contribution to answer correctness via gradient sensitivity. ADS leverages runtime entropy to dynamically modulate the GoGI threshold, preserving low-gradient tokens essential for structural coherence at high-uncertainty junctions. Trained on 7,472 MATH traces, our policy transfers zero-shot to AIME, GPQA, and GSM8K, reducing token volume by >45% and accelerating inference up to 2.0x without accuracy loss. These results suggest that thinking-optimal compression demands synergy between teleological goals and epistemic uncertainty.

IJCAI 2026

Ensuring Logic in the Fog: Sound POMDP Synthesis with LTL Objectives

Can Zhou, Yulong Gao, Pian Yu

Synthesising autonomous agents that can navigate uncertain environments while adhering to complex temporal constraints remains a fundamental challenge. While Linear Temporal Logic (LTL) provides a rigorous language for specifying such tasks, the inherent undecidability of qualitatively verifying LTL satisfaction in partially observable Markov decision processes renders quantitative synthesis difficult, especially when designing reliable reward signals for approximate solvers. In this paper, we bridge this gap with a novel, sound reward-shaping mechanism that dynamically generates belief-dependent rewards grounded in certified LTL satisfaction. By integrating this mechanism into an enhanced Monte Carlo Planning framework, we empower agents to navigate the `fog' of partial observability with a search process focused on maximising verifiable success. Our experiments demonstrate that this approach not only thrives in scenarios where existing solvers fail but also maintains effectiveness and scalability across diverse benchmark domains.

IJCAI 2026

NaVQA: Mitigating Silent Failures in Question Answering over Virtual Knowledge Graph

Guohui Xiao, Haohan Xue, Lin Ren, Yishuai Geng, Guilin Qi, Shenyu Zhang, DeHao Guo, Marco Di Panfilo, Davide Lanti, Linfang Ding

Virtual Knowledge Graphs (VKGs) provide unified access to legacy relational data sources through a high-level ontology modeling a domain of interest. The content of the ontology elements (classes and properties) is virtually mapped to underlying data sources through declarative mappings. The standard approach to interacting with a VKG system is to use SPARQL as the query language. However, the complexity of SPARQL creates a high entry barrier for normal users. In this paper, we study the VKG-QA task, which enables users to interact with the VKGs through a natural language (NL) interface by translating their questions into SPARQL queries. One critical challenge in such translation is silent failures, where a syntactically correct SPARQL query returns empty results because it involves ontology elements that lack mappings to the underlying data. To address this, we propose NaVQA (Navigation-based VKG Question Answering), a framework leveraging Large Language Models that (1) identifies and indexes the active ontology elements based on the mapping specifications, and (2) iteratively constructs a query graph from the NL question using the active ontology elements and their relations to synthesize SPARQL. Experiments on three real-world VKGs show that NaVQA significantly mitigates silent failures and outperforms existing baselines.

IJCAI 2026

Counterfactual Estimation via Temporal-Aware Intervention Networks

Xin Wang, Chi Luo, Shengfei Lyu, Yi Wan, Xiren Zhou, Xiangyu Wang, Huanhuan Chen

Accurate estimation of time-varying treatment effects is crucial for optimizing interventions in personalized medicine. However, observational data often contains complex confounding bias and temporal complexities, making counterfactual estimation challenging. We propose Counterfactual Estimation via Temporal-Aware Intervention Networks (TAIN), a novel model that introduces an Intervention-aware Functional Convolution kernel to emphasize the role of treatments and capture complex temporal treatment interactions. TAIN addresses confounding bias from a domain generalization perspective, approximating the unknown target domain using adversarial examples and incorporating Sharpness-Aware Minimization to derive a generalization bound. This approach is more suitable for longitudinal settings compared to existing methods inspired by domain adaptation techniques due to inherent differences between static and longitudinal contexts. Experiments on simulated datasets demonstrate TAIN's superior performance compared to state-of-the-art models for counterfactual estimation over time.

IJCAI 2026

Property Prediction of Stacked Bilayer Materials: A Multimodal Learning Approach

An Vuong, Minh-Hao Van, Chen Zhao, Xintao Wu

AI for materials science is a critical topic within AI for science, aiming to accelerate materials discovery and produce accurate property predictions. Bilayer 2D material stacking is essential for exploring new materials with novel functions and inherent phenomena, enabling the creation of new 2D bilayers for diverse real-world applications. Research on bilayer vdWs materials has made significant progress from experimental and computational perspectives. Various bilayer materials have been successfully synthesized experimentally and the increasing utilization of high-throughput computing technology has constructed several computational two-dimensional materials databases. However, the use of AI to model bilayer stacking and predict new properties remains underexplored, necessitating further research studies. In this work, we propose a novel multimodal learning approach to study the interfaces between dissimilar materials that jointly enable new or multiple functions, and to predict new properties arising from the vertical integration (stacking) of different functional material layers under given configurations. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of our approach compared to baseline methods. Our code is available at https://github.com/AnVuong123/bimat_ml.

IJCAI 2026

Identification of Probabilities of Causation: From Recursive to Closed-Form Bounds

Xin Shu, Shuai Wang, Ang Li

Probabilities of causation (PoCs) are fundamental quantities for counterfactual analysis and personalized decision making. However, existing analytical results are largely confined to binary settings. This paper extends PoCs to multi-valued treatments and outcomes by deriving closed form bounds for a representative family of discrete PoCs within Structural Causal Models, using standard experimental and observational distributions. We introduce the notion of equivalence classes of PoCs, which reduces arbitrary discrete PoCs to this family, and establish a replaceability principle that transfers bounds across value permutations. For the resulting bounds, we prove soundness in all dimensions and empirically verify tightness in low dimensional cases via Balke's linear programming method; we further conjecture that this tightness extends to all dimensions. Simulations indicate that our closed form bounds consistently tighten recent recursive bounds while remaining simpler to compute. Finally, we illustrate the practical relevance of our results through toy examples.

IJCAI 2026

Learning to Solve and Optimize by Evolving Code

Veronika Semmelrock, Benedetta Strizzolo, Francesco Zuccato, Gerhard Friedrich, Patrick Rodler, Konstantin Schekotihin

Combinatorial and optimization problems are fundamental to many industrial AI applications. Solving large-scale real-world instances of such problems typically requires careful problem formalization, specialized solvers, and expert-designed heuristics. Thus, experts need to specify not only *what* solutions are, but also *how* they are derived. By introducing the tool CheckMate, we show that algorithm generation via code evolution represents a paradigm shift by eliminating the need to formulate the *how*. CheckMate solely relies on the *what*. Specifically, a formal specification ensures solutions' correctness and enables systematic performance evaluation of the generated programs, while a natural language description guides the evolutionary process. The effectiveness of our method is demonstrated on selected problems from two industrial domains: configuration and scheduling. In all cases, the evolved algorithms consistently outperform state-of-the-art solvers. This underscores the potential of formal methods in guiding code evolution for automatically solving complex real-world problems.

IJCAI 2026

Abstracting the Indistinguishable in ASP

Zeynep G. Saribatur, Markus Hecher, Johannes K. Fichte

Answer Set Programming (ASP) is a popular knowledge representation and reasoning framework with countless applications for modeling and solving combinatorial problems. With increasingly large applications, identifying crucial details and collapsing irrelevant or indistinguishable information becomes crucial for a human in the loop. This idea led to the investigation of different notions of abstraction, which relate to forgetting and projection. Very recently, clustering formalisms have been designed that also preserve program dependencies. However, crucial computational properties, such as finding abstractions, remained entirely unexplored to date. In this work, we examine the computational complexity of existing abstraction techniques based on clustering (faithful and uniform abstractions). Besides checking, we tackle the crucial question of constructing abstractions, by also proposing a novel syntactic operator to achieve uniform abstractions, when possible. Moreover, we investigate whether symmetry detection can be used to determine abstractable parts in a program, and give insights on the difference of interchangeability and indistinguishability, by introducing a relaxation of the uniform abstraction condition to capture semantic indistinguishability. We observe that this notion enables us to obtain intuitive faithful abstractions, while symmetry does not. We explore properties needed to reach abstractions from syntactic symmetry.

IJCAI 2026

Splitting Meanings: A Unified View on Paraconsistency and Inconsistency Measurement

Yakoub Salhi

We propose a modular logical framework for both reasoning with and measuring inconsistency in propositional knowledge bases. The framework extends propositional logic with markers attached to occurrences of atoms and interpreted as pointers to worlds. This allows different occurrences of the same atom to be evaluated in different contexts unless they share a marker. We define paraconsistent entailment relations via abnormality functions that associate each model with a set of deviations from a preferred behavior. Each entailment relation is then defined with respect to models that are minimal under set inclusion. We show that suitable markings and abnormality functions capture several existing forms of inconsistency-tolerant reasoning, including entailment based on maximal satisfiable subsets and the minimally inconsistent Logic of Paradox. We also show how a range of inconsistency measures can be expressed in the same setting. Thus our framework provides a uniform basis for diverse approaches to inconsistency handling and measurement.

IJCAI 2026

Information-Needs-Guided Virtual Knowledge Graph Enrichment via Large Language Models

Lin Ren, Guohui Xiao, Guilin Qi, Wenjie Du, Yishuai Geng, Haohan Xue, Zhiyan Yue, Mingxuan Li, Marco Di Panfilo, Davide Lanti, Kamal Hamaz, Linfang Ding

Virtual Knowledge Graphs (VKGs) provide an effective solution for data integration by mapping heterogeneous data sources to a unified ontology. However, existing VKG construction frameworks primarily focus on one-shot construction, which often results in partial data coverage and support for only initial information needs. After the VKG has been deployed, new information needs will inevitably arise over time. Therefore, enriching VKGs to support evolving information needs remains an expert-intensive iterative task. In this work, we formulate the task of Information-Needs-Guided VKG Enrichment (IN-VKGE), and propose an iterative framework that leverages large language models to assess whether information needs can be supported using SPARQL execution feedback and generate ontology and mapping enrichment proposals. Experiments on two real-world VKGs show that our approach outperforms existing paradigms, and produces enrichment proposals that receive high expert ratings for effectively resolving the identified information needs.

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